This just makes me wonder what those bees are thinking in there just a week and a day after obtaining pollen from the maple trees around here.
Weather.com is reporting the following as our current conditions.
| Now 15°F | High | Low |
| Feels Like: -1° | 24° | 12° |
I have always thought of genetics as something similar to a high stakes game of poker. It is
obvious that you want a good hand, however, you don’t know what cards are needed until the game is going and you find out what cards the other players are holding. With life the stakes are higher and sometimes the rules change in the middle of the game. Everything can be going along just fine, then a new pest, virus, bacteria or environmental factor can change everything. Nature’s way of building genetic diversity through survival of the fittest (and luckiest) has led every species on the planet to the point that we find them in right now.
I was amazed to read this month in American Bee Journal,
“A further challenge to the maintenance of a broad genetic foundation for breeding results from current large-scale queen production practices, whereby each queen “mother” is typically used to produce more than a thousand daughter queens. Overall, it has been estimated that fewer than 500 queen mothers are used to produce around 900,000 daughter queens annually for commercial sale in the US (Delaney et al. 2009).
Freshman biology at Purdue taught that the more genetic diversity present in a population the greater the chance of some individuals living through any given catastrophe. It seems like queen rearers are using a fairly limited deck of cards to me. Man has been able to selectively breed domesticated plants and animals in response to problems and solutions we think we understand. Nature deals the cards a lot of times giving an organism answers to problems we haven’t even thought of yet. The article also states:
“Unfortunately, the arrival and establishment of parasitic mites in the late 1980′s eliminated much of the feral bee population and consequently, the potential source of usable germplasm for breeding. There is recent evidence that remnants of the US feral population may yet persist (Magnus and Szlansky 2005; Seeley 2007), which could restore the utility of this population to bee breading.”
I can attest that feral bees are out there, at least in my area. Odds are good that they are in other areas as well. Evidently some good cards were already dealt and in play long before mites arrived here in the 1980’s. Yeah a lot of bees left the table, but some colonies evidently had good enough hands to keep playing the game.
Even if you are dead set on ordering packaged bees maybe a little research and experimentation will surprise you. This year go ahead and order your packages, but also look into trying to catch some feral swarms via swarm trapping. I recommend Swarm Traps and Bait Hives by McCartney Taylor (http://learningbeekeeping.com/). It is a very basic book, and it will get you headed in the right direction. Also use this site as a resource. I will have material forthcoming on building swarm traps. Once you catch your first swarm you will be hooked.
How much would you pay for a package of bees that was advertised to be treatment free and had a strong likelihood to have some nosema and varroa resistance? What if you could get them for free? Remember, feral bees weren’t treated for ANYTHING, YET are strong enough to overwinter and swarm! With each feral colony you bring into your apiary you will be getting more potential wild cards helping you not only overcome known diseases and pests but maybe even ones we haven’t yet encountered.
I don’t gamble but DEAL ME IN!!!
What do you think? Leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.
Sheppard, Walter Honey Bee Genetic Diversity and Breeding – Towards the Reintroduction of European Germplasm American Bee Journal Volume 152 No. 2 February 2012, pages 155- 156
I was at a mentor beekeepers house for a visit on 2/3/2012. We took a look at his hives to see if bees were flying. The high that day was 54F. We have had unseasonably warm weather here in Eastern Central Indiana for at least the last week with highs between 50F and 60F. His bees were flying as expected. What was not expected was that they were bringing in pollen. We began to look around his yard and discovered that the maple trees were blooming. It remains to be seen if this is a very good thing. Both of us discussed whether this would induce the queen to begin ramping up or not. If she begins to lay a lot of eggs anticipating that winter is over and we get back to normal February conditions our bees could eat through what is left of their winter stores more rapidly.
I had 14 colonies going into winter. I am aware of one that most likely has alread expired. March and the dandelions cannot get here soon enough.
The barrel on the right contained the hive.
Shortly after picking up my first two hives in 2010 I was notified of some bees living in a whiskey barrel located in brush pile that was days from being burnt. I had no clue what I was doing, but with the help of my wife and father, I hived the bees that have driven me to the point of starting this blog. Affectionately known in my household as the “Gerald Hive”. There was something very different about this colony.
I wondered why this hive seemed to be more robust than the colonies that had come from packages. I had read extensively from books and bee journals prior to getting started. My question was how could this colony be surviving and thriving with no one getting into the hive to check brood patterns, do mite treatments, and provide supplemental feeding? Everything I had read up to that point told me this could not be. I began to question everything.
Good brood patern for a feral queen.
Once I moved the hive to its stand I only opened it once in June to place 3 shallow supers on top. I then opened it on 8/22 to take the FULL supers off. I did not arrange combs for them to go through the winter, treat them, or feed them. Fast forward to the spring of 2011 and the Gerald Hive was still humming along. It came through the winter covering six frames. How could this be?
I decided to begin an experiment. Allowing the bees living in my boxes to find their own way. Keeping my interference to a minimum. Interference to me includes feeding, swarm suppression, arranging frames for winter, frequent moving of hives, and opening the hive for no good reason other than my own morbid curiosity. I will allow inferior colonies to expire, and let superior ones propagate. Whatever will bee will bee.
It didn’t look pretty, but I got the queen.
